CAN PIRACY SAVE THE PC?

We hear a lot these days about the death of the PC games market. Now, frankly the uniquely terrible nature of statistics in the UK with regard to the PC games market makes the proposition that the market is dying an extremely difficult one to either confirm or refute. The most recent published figures show that the PC takes around 15-20% of the UK games market share by value (obviously things fluctuate from month to month depending on what games have been released), comfortably above the 360 and PS3 and only slightly behind the Nintendo DS. (The Wii crushes everything in its path, and has resulted in everything else having a smaller market share than in 2007, when the PC was often in first place – in July of that year, for example, the PC took 20.7% of the full-price market by value, ahead of the 360 with 17.8% and the DS’s 17.1%.)

What’s more, these particular figures come from official UK chart compilers Chart-Track, whose “Methodology” page states that their reports ”are based on over-the-counter retail sales”, and therefore don’t include download sales or things like subscriptions to MMOs, which must both make up a huge proportion of the money spent on gaming. (Steam, for example, has 15 million registered users.) On the other hand, the PC charts are notorious for including non-games “leisure” titles, with the likes of Norton Anti-Virus fluffing up the numbers, so frankly the official UK sales stats (such as they are) are close to worthless and get us nowhere.

Crytek hunt through the twilight underworld for people with illegal copies of Crysis.

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume for now that if so many people (Crytek, Epic, iD and others, slightly oddly even including Chart-Track themselves) are saying the PC market is dying, then it must be so. The question for PC gamers then becomes ”What can we do to stop it?” After all, there’s a credit crunch on and we’re all about to be thrown out of our homes, so just saying “Quick, everyone buy twice as many games!” won’t cut it. Apart from anything else, who can afford petrol to drive to the shops these days? So we need a smarter solution.